So this serial killer who murders hitchhikers is driving along a deserted highway and he picks up a guy, but what he doesn’t know is that the hitchhiker is a serial killer who murders drivers …
If you’re the kind of viewer who, seeing that on TV one night, would hardly be able to wait for work the next day to tell everybody about it, then you’re the target audience for “Masters of Horror.”
“We’re the kids of … what you would now call ‘water cooler programs,’ ” says Joe Dante, one of 13 genre veterans to direct an episode of the new anthology series, which debuts at 9 p.m. Friday on Showtime.
“Go to school and what did everybody talk about on Monday?” Dante asks. “They talked about what was on ‘The Twilight Zone.’ “
Dante and the others are going for something like those horror and sci-fi anthologies that electrified and scared them when they were growing up. Some directors went for gore, some for atmospherics, and others used humor to set up the shocks.
There were no rules.
“The only thing we asked for was smart and scary,” says Mick Garris, the executive producer of “Masters of Horror.”
Garris is one of the regulars at twice-a-month Hollywood dinners where the horror genre’s most bloodthirsty directors gather to discuss spectacular ways to puncture eyeballs and other trade secrets. The more they chatted, the more the directors realized that they were nostalgic, not just for the creepy TV shows of their youth, but for a time before their pictures carried the weight of jillion-dollar budgets and the resulting studio meddling.
Nobody will talk about the budget for an episode of “Masters of Horror,” but given the shooting schedule–each one must be completed in 10 days–it’s safe to say that it wouldn’t cover the cost of the pea soup used in “The Exorcist.”
Though “Masters of Horror” was inspired by “Twilight Zone” and other 1960s anthology shows, you can expect to see more blood and gore in the Showtime anthology series. A lot more.
“We’re telling horrific stories,” Garris says. “And over the years, there has indeed been a trend toward more sensational, more graphic depictions of horror.
“If you watch ‘The Twilight Zone’ or ‘One Step Beyond’ today, it will be entertaining, but it will not necessarily scare an audience that has been brought up on things that have been more graphically presented. I don’t think any of us are doing gore for the sake of gore, but we’re also not avoiding it.”
———-
Edited by Curt Wagner (cwwagner@tribune.com) and Victoria Rodriguez (vrodriguez@tribune.com)
